Tag: Crabb

Anything left to smile about?

The Tory leadership election. Smile? No, surely not.  With May, Leadsom, Gove of Cawdor and Crabb out there.

I did manage a smile recently when a friend compared Sarah Vine, wife to Michael Gove, to Lady Macbeth. But Michael has already all but departed the play.

Theresa May at least has a track record, but the notion of putting our future, our future in Europe and our future in the world, in the hands of someone with as little experience yet so shrill and sure of herself as Andrea Leadsom is … daft is the word that comes to mind.

I read that ‘(Leadsom’s) pitch for the job was about social justice and cracking down on corporate greed’. She’s been part of government that has put deficit reduction before social justice, and turned a blind eye to corporate greed….

I don’t of course have a vote. Though I have wondered about joining the party. I think with a haircut and a flower in my lapel I just might pass muster.

I have in the past attended Tory party functions, and even won a pashmina shawl in a raffle. (No, it didn’t suit me, in case you wondered.)

The story that I was an anarchist fifth-columnist is a lie.

I’ve been thinking there was little left in this unholy mess to amuse, but then along came Ken Clarke, caught off the record by Sky TV. If Ken Clarke can be a member of the party, why, for heaven’s sake, not me?

‘I think with Michael [Gove] as prime minister we’d go to war with at least three countries at once…He did us all a favour by getting rid of Boris. The idea of Boris as prime minister is ridiculous.’

‘I don’t think either Andrea Leadsom or Boris Johnson actually are in favour of leaving the European Union.  (Malcolm Rifkind: ‘Well I don’t think they even cared very much either way.’)  …. She is not one of the tiny band of lunatics who think we can have a sort of glorious economic future outside the single market…. So long as she understands that she’s not to deliver on some of the extremely stupid things she’s been saying.’

‘Theresa (May) is a bloody difficult woman but you and I worked with Margaret Thatcher (laughs) …I get on all right with her … and she is good… She’s been at the Home Office far too long, so I only know in detail what her views are on the Home Office …She doesn’t know much about foreign affairs.’

The same again please

Written before May announced and Johnson renounced, and then Gove pronounced. More on that later…

I’ll argue to the end for the re-assertion of parliamentary democracy (over referenda) and continued membership of the EU. And millions with me, I know. But, if that doesn’t happen, what should we argue for – what should we demand?

The same…

If we can’t have the EU we need the EU without the EU. The same workplace, health and safety, and environmental legislation, the same Europe-wide agreements in science, the same cooperation in the arts.

What we still want to be a part of came about because of the EU. That fact will be more than apparent for many of us. Maybe the realisation will strike home for a few Leave voters.

The same vision: that’s more difficult – the open inclusive vision that many of us have is simply not shared. And that, as long as it doesn’t shade into bigotry and prejudice, I can just about accept – I must accept. (That it did so shade in the referendum is a challenge for all of us.)

The same trade deal: all save a few economists on the neo-liberal wing of the Tories (or beyond that wing) would like to be spared tariffs, would want to be part of a single market. EU regulations would have to be adopted by the UK – little option but to do otherwise – and any reining back would be a betrayal of civilised values.

Compromise is sometimes possible: in some areas we have to take a stand. And that means immigration, the devilish strand that is woven through history. Our forebears somewhere way back were immigrants, and their progeny a generation or two down the line took up against the next wave. Each generation has to manage the issue as best and as widely as it can.

Wisdom in a referendum too easily goes out the window, as it has done here. Fertile ground for wild statements appealing to the worst in people. I would have trusted Cameron to bring that wisdom to any negotiation. I think I might also trust Stephen Crabb. Start out with a degree of humility not arrogance. Boris Johnson has today disqualified himself, though there’s no more humility there than in his nemesis, Michael Gove.